


Where the Heart Has Been

by youremyqueen



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: ADWD spoilers, Angst, Fic Exchange, Home, M/M, POV Male Character, POV Third Person, Prompt Fic, Winter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-30
Updated: 2012-12-30
Packaged: 2017-11-23 00:21:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,915
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/615987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/youremyqueen/pseuds/youremyqueen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes Jon thinks he'd died out in the snows.</p><p>written for got_exchange, prompt was: <i>going home.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Where the Heart Has Been

It's the red woman that saves him, and it shouldn't be a shock, but it is. The shock is her hair, hanging over him like a curtain, blocking out the frozen stars of the North and tickling his jaw, the skin there frosted numb. The shock is her voice, liquid and bright, when she whispers words that he doesn't understand, even though he thinks they're in the Common Tongue. The shock is the flames, or something like flames - hot and dagger sharp - spitting through his wound, burning or mending or branding him.

When Jon wakes, she's sitting there, dress pooled around her hips and snow on her bare skin, seemingly unaffected by the cold. He tries not to look at her breasts, bows his head instead to examine the half-healed gash in his chest. It ought to sicken him, but he can barely manage anything more than a cool, tired interest at the state of his own body. He wonders vaguely if he's died, and aches quietly to find that it doesn't seem to matter.

The Wildlings are packing up camp; Val with enough furs for two, babe clutched tight to her breast, and Tormund's voice booming through the thin clearing they're stopped in. Satin's there, too, and Pyp with him, and a scant few other boys - _men, now,_ he supposes - from The Wall. Grenn is dead, they tell him, many and more with him. Jon half-wishes he could muster something like grief, but all he feels is fire licking inside of him, and Melisandre's eyes on his back.

"Where are we going?" he asks her, when they're already days into their journey.

She smiles in the way she always does, burning and false. "Home," she says, like the word means something.

\---

Jon thinks she's playing with straight lies and half-truths, just to keep him satisfied, and when they finally - after too many days, too many dead, and Jon wishing that he could still feel the cold - reach the gates of Winterfell, he wants to yell at her about not telling him. Her eyes glint, though, and no sound moves past his throat. He doesn't yell much at all, anymore.

If it was home to him once, it's no longer suited to house anyone, let alone a king. But the king is there, or one of them, anyway, and before meat or mead or even the barest traces of bread and salt, Jon's brought up into the only full-standing tower, where Stannis is arguing in hushed tones with a woman Jon does not know, but who sparks recognition nonetheless.

"This," Stannis introduces him brusquely, gesturing vaguely in his direction, "is the Lord Commander of the Night's Watch."

"No, Your Grace," Jon tells him, in a quiet voice, harsh from as little use as he has been able manage, "not anymore"

After a long silence, Stannis sends the woman out of the room, then sends Jon out after her. Moments alone with Melisandre, though, and he's demanding him back again. Jon limps his way in and out with little complaint. Stannis's constant, quiet fury used to amuse him, but he can't quite find the feeling any longer, as if it's something that had been lost out in the snows, along with his title and most of his men and maybe that family he used to be part of, a long time ago.

If seeing the ruins of Winterfell would have twisted him up terribly a mere fortnight ago, he can't manage a speck of sadness for it now, and if Stannis's war-worn face would have inspired something like affection, it's a feeling long lost at this point. He wonders if he really had died out there in the snows.

"Do you even understand what you've done, Snow?" Stannis demands, teeth grit and hands taut on the edge of the desk. Jon can see the veins, tight with an icy, coiled anger, and wonders if Stannis won't hit him. Won't dig out that dagger at his hip and carve into Jon's chest. Melisandre could just bring him back to life again, anyway. Maybe that would strike him as a good jest, if he hadn't lost his sense of humor, too.

"I did what you asked of me, Your Grace, as much as I could. I did what I thought was right." If Stannis notices that Jon has phrased those two conceits as lining up, he doesn't remark of it.

And if Jon - after Stannis has leveled him with his stony eyes and kicked him out again - stands on the other side of the door with the half-sleeping guard and listens to Melisandre demand that they fix the situation by having sex and Stannis go on a long-winded rant about _"thrice-damned R'hllor,"_ before finally acquiescing, he doesn't bother to ask himself why he remains to hear it through to the end.

\---

There are things all over the ruins that remind him of his childhood, but he resolves rather early on not to think on them, and it's almost an unsettlingly easy plan to follow. He's not sure why he goes to the Godswood, only that it's there that he learns the identity of the woman who had been with Stannis when he'd arrived. She's a Greyjoy, brother to the man slumped on his knees before the Heart Tree, praying to a God who isn't listening.

He stares at Theon for a long moment, and something like rage lights in him, but it quickly snuffs itself out. Maybe Jon would kill him if he weren't so tired, maybe he would yell and demand vengeance, demand his head on a pike - like Bran's and Rickon's and _no_ , he's not thinking about that, there's no use in thinking about that - but as it is, he just stands on the frosted ground, watching the harsh sun glint off of the iced over pool until Theon's white, matted head turns toward him.

He doesn't look as shocked as he does anticipatory, like he's just waiting for Jon to draw his sword, like he wouldn't mind terribly if he did.

"Last I heard," Jon says, across the quiet clearing, "you were imprisoned at the Dreadfort, being taken apart bit by bit." The letters from Bolton had stirred something in him - justice or sickness or maybe something else - that he can't remember how to feel now.

"Last you heard," Theon says back, voice low and eyes to the ground, "I was." Looking at him now, it's not hard to presume the truth of that statement. "As was your sister."

Theon flicks his eyes to edge of the Godswood, and Jon's follow his. If he's expecting to see Arya, if something sparks ever so briefly in the pit of his stomach, he shoves it down when he actually takes a good look at the girl there, bent over a hedge and making childish faces at a rabbit.

"That's Jeyne Poole," Jon says, even as it occurs to him.

Theon watches her, too, like she's his sister instead. "I know that it's Jeyne Poole," he murmurs, "but Stannis doesn't, and he - he oughtn't find out." It sounds more like a plea than a threat, and Jon still hasn't decided if he wants to kill him or not. "Unless you'd like to see her dead."

"I'd rather see you dead," he says back, voice level, but he knows that he sounds tired. He is tired. He half-wishes Theon would up and die on his own, so Jon wouldn't have to go through the effort of conjuring enough hate, enough of that fiery loathing that he'd once felt so low in his gut, to actually go through with the deed itself. He wonders, idly, watching the malnourished edge of Theon's jaw where the skin is tugged tight against the bone, how he hasn't wasted away all on his own yet.

"Wouldn't we all?" Theon does something like a laugh then, but it sounds more like a half-arsed choke than anything. "Your king won't allow it, though, not after the deal he made with my sister."

Jon can't decide whether he's angry at Stannis for that, then resolves to be, because it gives him something to do. "He's not my king," he says on instinct, even though it's not necessarily true. _The Watch takes no part,_ but Jon is not part of the Watch any longer, and he's here, isn't he? Stannis is his king, because Stannis the king that will have him, that insists upon making whatever use of him that he can.

"Nor mine," Theon tells him, turning back to the Heart Tree, like he's grown bored of Jon, "but Robb's killed," - and if his voice breaks slightly then, they both pretend that it doesn't - "and there's not any other place to go." Jeyne has scared the rabbit away, and is now just sitting in the snow, staring out at nothing, as Theon appears to be listening to something. As if the Old Gods are speaking directly to him. "Not the worst place to be stuck, though," he says, glancing briefly over his shoulder at Jon. "Home, sweet home, isn't it?"

 _"This isn't your home, Greyjoy,"_ he wants to say, but it doesn't seem worth the effort, and instead he walks away, and keeps walking until he reaches Stannis's door. The guard doesn't stop him when he shoves it open, walking straight in on the king, half-dressed and looking diminished at the small table set in the middle of the room. These were Bran's chambers, Jon thinks, but it's hard to remember what they had looked like before being filled to bursting with scavenged, partly scorched furniture and more maps than anyone rightly needs.

Stannis takes only one glance at him before going back to his notes, eyes scanning quickly over a stack of letters. "Come in, then," he mutters, the low light of the morning casting unearthly shadows on his face, making him look hollowed out like the dead. He sounds as tired as Jon feels.

"Why is Theon Greyjoy alive?" Jon asks, and it's more perfunctory than anything, at this point, because he's not even sure that he cares. Stannis's chest is visible through the loose ties of his shirt, and, though he's never been an overly large man, he looks thinner than he ever has, and even more unlike a king than usual.

Stannis barely glances up from his letter. "If you've seen him, I should be asking you the same. Or did you want my permission to take your vengeance?" He takes a sip of something, setting the mug back on the table with a hard clang. "If that's the case, you won't have it. I need Lady Asha's allegiance more than I need yours. Now that you've no power at The Wall, I can't imagine what use you are to me."

Jon just stands there, hair hanging in his face, and trying to decide whether or not to be insulted. "Then why did your red woman bring me," - he stops himself before he can say _back to life_. "Save me," he corrects, "and bring me here?"

Stannis scoffs. "Don't ask me why Melisandre does the things she does."

Jon just continues to stand there, staring. The strong line of Stannis's clavicle stares back at him. Then he turns on his heel and leaves.

\---

He spends most days with Ghost, walking the fallen stones of Winterfell, and if his direwolf remembers this place, he makes no indication of it. He thinks things would be different if Sam were here, or Grenn, even. Then maybe Pyp would still meet his eyes, and Satin would do more than just remind him to eat and to sleep, in warm, quiet whispers that puff softly against Jon's ears. Val speaks to him more than anyone does, but all she does is remind him of Ygritte, which only serves to make him consider how sad the thought of her would have made him not long ago. Now he feels the snowflakes in his hair, and thinks that Ygritte might have had the right idea, dying and staying dead. Nothing good comes of dead men walking, Jon can attest to that.

Once, on one of his many early morning trudges through the snows, he catches sight of something shocking and red out in the Godswood, putting the leaves of the Heart Tree to shame. Melisandre's hair falls in thick tendrils and she appears to hear his approach without him making a single sound.

He wants to ask about Stannis, but instead says, "I died out in the snows, didn't I?"

She smiles her blazing smile at him, lips sealing themselves in a curve that makes his stomach tighten, but she says nothing. Jon doesn't think she needs to.

\---

It's only when Stannis finally asks something of him that Jon remembers an edge of that anger, that pulling, sharp loss and desperation that had gotten lost somewhere between The Wall and Winterfell. He proposes a plan to have Jon return to Castle Black and beg the assistance of whoever is currently in charge. He doesn't say it like that, of course - would never dream of using the word "beg" - but it's what it comes down to.

Jon tells him, in as respectable of terms as he can manage, that the Others can take this bloody plan and do what they will with it.

"Negotiating with you is half of what lost me my post in the first place," he yells, finding his voice for the first time in a long time. He'd had a place in the world, he'd had brothers - _true_ brothers - and it's all gone now. Jon knows that he'd done the right thing, but it _hurts_ nonetheless, and Jon is tired of always doing the right thing. Stannis is as just a man as can be found, and he's no better off than Jon, huddled away in his ramshackle castle, waiting for winter to end. 

Stannis curls his lip and Jon wants to snarl back, hears Ghost baring his teeth with a low growl and has to put effort into calming himself down. "Your Grace," Jon finally says, in a quieter voice than he wants to, "The Wall is all that I had, and I lost it." The words dig heavy in his chest and it's a battle just to spit them out. "It can't be regained. Not by me, anyway, and not now. You were right. I am no longer of any use." He says with a stoic, determined sort of self-pity, if only to counteract the way that Stannis looks down his nose at him. "I have given everything to this war of yours."

Stannis frowns his humorless frown and says, "A look at the Greyjoy lad will show you that there's much and more left to be taken."

Jon can't quite conjure up his hate for Theon, but he can, at least, manage to loath the look that Stannis is giving him, and it gives him fire enough to grit his teeth and say, "The Greyjoy lad is a turncloak and a coward."

"Yes," Stannis says. Jon thinks he's going to leave at that, until he stands from his make-shift desk and walks around, putting he and Jon within whispering distance. "I was under the curious impression," he continues, "that you weren't."

Jon can tell that Stannis is trying to goad him into accepting his farce of a plan, and he takes the opportunity to be the one doing the mocking. He laughs and it sounds foreign and cold to his ears. He shakes his head, and the smile hurts his face. "I have been bled dry, _Your Grace_ ," he says, putting a bite into the title. "If there's anything left of pride or of heart in me, I can't feel it."

Stannis gives him a peculiar look then, eyebrows lifting, and he looks curiously… amused. Jon hates the expression.

"What pretty words," he says. "Perhaps you should have been a poet rather than a failed Night's Watchman. You certainly have the face for it." He murmurs the last with a quick look down the length of Jon's body, a look most definitely not directed at his face. Jon knows that look, knows it from the grubby old men at the Watch who haven't seen a woman in months or years, and suppose him a good enough substitute. Stannis doesn't leer though, and doesn't let his eyes hover, just pulls them back up to meet Jon's quickly, almost ashamedly. "You could write the verses of my heroic victory over the Seven Kingdoms," he says, voice lower than it had been.

Jon tries to snort, but he doesn't think it works. "Of that I'm afraid I'd have nothing to say," he says.

Stannis frowns, but looks as if he's going to step back, perhaps go for another round of reasons why Jon ought to take his ridiculous orders, ought to bend to his every bad idea, when Jon decides that he rather doesn't want that, and leans up and kisses him. 

Stannis stiffens against him, body going ridged, coiled to shove Jon away, but he doesn't move. Jon presses closer, lips melding warm against Stannis's, sinking in because there's little and less left to do. He'd died out in the snows, probably, and if he's forced to live in this ruin of his former life with this ruin of a king, he'll have to make the best of it. Stannis's hands are cold but firm as they wrap around's Jon's back, and it all feels terribly dishonorable and low. And good. Better than most things have, of late.

He's only done this sort of thing with Satin, and only once, but Satin barely speaks to him anymore, and like as not wouldn't touch him if his survival depended on it. Stannis, on the other hand, is warm and his shoulder muscles tense in Jon's grip. He smells like fire, the way Melisandre does. 

After a long, stifling moment, Stannis shoves him back, and Jon lets himself be shoved.

"Your Grace," he says, catching his breath. "Stannis. We're not going to win." 

Maybe his chapped lips and the labor of his breathing shouldn't go hand-in-hand with talk of the war this way, a perfect disparity. On the other hand, maybe they should. There's something almost comforting about the situation, bizarre as it is.

Stannis presses forward, shoving Jon bodily against the wall and looming over him. He's not actually much larger, but he reeks like furious power and his eyes are bruising. "It's _'we'_ now, is it?" he asks. "Finally picked a side, then?"

Jon's voice is harsh in his throat, and it takes some effort to push out. "Better you than any of the others." He feels petulant and childish, younger than he has in what must have been years. A boy yet, it seems, even after all that's happened, all he's done and had to do.

"What a glowing endorsement," Stannis says, and his jaw is unclenching slowly.

"I apologize, but you were very wrong about me, Your Grace," Jon tells him quietly. "I'd make a terrible poet."

Stannis doesn't often smile, and he isn't now, but there's something like untroubled amusement quirking in his face when he reaches down to unlace Jon's breeches. "Yes, I imagine you would," he mutters. 

His hand is firm and his strokes are hard and not very forgiving, wrist flicking efficiently as he watches Jon with something distant in his eyes. Jon wants to say something, wants to do something with his own hands, or maybe just kiss him again, but he remains too shocked at being tugged off by the king to really allow for sufficient brain function. When Jon comes he feels young and guilty and foul, and has to use Stannis's arm to hold himself up, head spinning with more feeling than he knows what to do with.

He watches Stannis wipe his hands on a rag, and stumbles out into the hall without bothering to do up his breeches.

\---

The next night he comes back, and they do the same, only this time it's half on the desk and Stannis comes, too, body spasming stiffly above his. Jon still can't decide if it's mortifying or brilliant, and settles somewhere in between. At the least, it gives Stannis a reason or two not to insist on sending him back to The Wall. The next night is, in essence, the same, although the details are slightly changed. Stannis is in a chair and Jon is, possibly humiliatingly, in his lap, and it occurs to him only when most of his clothes are hanging off that Stannis has a wife - at The Wall still, presumably - and that this probably makes Jon something very dishonorable. His only comfort lies in the lack of ability to produce any bastards, and the fact that, outside of the events themselves, he and Stannis do absolutely nothing to acknowledge the arrangement.

Jon drinks too much, though, but tells himself it's not out of guilt. There's just nothing else to do here, and the crumbled, smoke-stained stones of Winterfell are more easily ignored with ale to blur his eyes. He runs into Theon rather too much, because he's taken to getting pissed in the Godswood where none of his former brothers will see him, and more often than not is too muddled by the alcohol to bother to resent his existence. Theon, who usually bounces through varying states of lucidity, depending on whether or not anyone else is around, looks at him once with very familiar eyes and says, "Didn't you take the black?"

Jon frowns, and notices that he's wearing a brown cloak. One of Stannis's, he thinks, and then feels vaguely ill. "Yes." he says. "They took it back."

Theon, for some reason, seems to find that uproariously funny, and even more so when Jon trips over his own feet and lands thickly on a snowdrift next to him. Jon considers strangling him, but instead offers him some of his drink, which Theon takes gratefully.

"I died out the snows," he says, because he feels like he needs to tell somebody, and Theon is too mad to know the words from his own convoluted thoughts. He looks up at the dark sky, speckled with falling snowflakes, and thinks he might die again.

"Sometimes I forget that I've not died," Theon says. "It's hard to remember." He looks at Jon then, and there's something hazy and terrible in his eyes that opens up a pit in Jon's stomach that he's been desperate to keep locked closed. "Do you remember his face?" he asks, so quietly that at first Jon thinks he's heard wrong, but he knows he hasn't. It's not hard to guess who he's talking about. Jon doesn't say anything, and Theon shakes his head. "It's all so hard to remember."

Jon swallows, and can't decide who he feels more sorry for, but settles on himself just out of sheer personal bias.

"It's just this feeling," Theon continues, seemingly unperturbed by Jon's lack of response. He talks to himself often enough that he wouldn't be. "All I remember are feelings. This place feels like home."

Jon's throat feels dry, and in that moment, he hates Theon more for those words than he does for Bran or Rickon or Robb or any of it, just hates him so terribly, wants to shout, _"This is not your home!"_ at the top of his lungs, but he thinks his lips must be frozen shut, so he stands and marches off drunkenly instead. It's only as an afterthought that he tells Asha Greyjoy that her brother is going to freeze to death if someone doesn't go out and retrieve him.

\---

Jon doesn't go to the king's chambers the next night, or the night after that, and Stannis actually has the gall to send Melisandre to fetch him. She sparks at him with her cruel, clever eyes and Jon wishes she had left him dead. He's no good here, and being the king's bedwarmer isn't the sort of work he's looking to do for the realm. He doesn't care about this war, and it's not his war to fight, and he tells Stannis as much when he gets up to his rooms, yells it in his face before anything else can be said, and then stands there breathing heavily and feeling more ridiculous than he has done since he was a boy.

Stannis stares at him the whole time, not saying anything.

"I died out in those snows, did you know?" Jon asks, mostly just provoke a reaction. "Your red woman brought me back."

Stannis does react, but not how Jon expects him to. He scoffs. "Don't be ridiculous, Melisandre told me all about it. You were only wounded." He says it like it's something simple, but the way that it hits Jon in the gut isn't simple at all. "You would have died, perhaps," Stannis tells him, "but you didn't."

He's going over his letters again. There's not much more to do these days than go over letters, review battle plans against the armies that are stranded frozen leagues away. The war is on a break, if only because it can't find a way to wage itself around the snows.

"If that's all that's been getting to you - " Stannis starts, sounding like he doesn't care, which means he probably does.

Jon cuts him off. "I need to go to The Wall," he says, not truly realizing what he's decided until he says it. He feels sick, like all that's been lost is being shoved back into him, and he's not got enough space to squeeze it all in. He remembers that Grenn is dead and it cuts so much deeper than the first time he's heard it that he can barely keep the feeling down. "I need to go The Wall," he repeats.

"What? After I spent a fortnight ordering you to go, only to be met with childish refusal?" Stannis is looking at him like he's a boy again, and Jon hates it. He's so thrilled, in fact, by being able to feel that hate so sharply - that anger burning, like Melisandre's eyes and the bodies of the Others and Stannis's hands on his hips - that he forgets to hate it very much at all.

"It's not for you," he says, not really registering how that might go over, "it's for the realm. The Others, the Walkers, it's all - they're all coming. It's where I'm needed." He's speaking too fast, he knows, but it feels good to care about something so much. "It's where you're needed, too," he continues, "and if you cared about more than victory - "

Stannis scoffs again. Stannis loves scoffing at him. Part of the reason kissing him is so nice is that it stops him scoffing. "It's not that simple, Snow. Wive's tales and children's stories and - "

"And real people," Jon says, "who will die if I don't go." He means it very earnestly, even if it sounds self-centered.

"As if you could save them all on your own?" Stannis asks, standing now, too. 

Maybe it's impudent for Jon to be pacing back and forth through the king's rooms like they're his own, but he's done so much more in the king's rooms of late that it feels perfectly natural. "I can't stay here," he mumbles, more to himself than to Stannis.

Stannis crosses his arms. "It's your home, isn't it?"

If Jon weren't so distracted, he might have gotten it in his mind - at those words, at the way they'd been said - that Stannis doesn't want to him to leave.

"Is it?" Jon says, finally stopping. "I keep forgetting." He thinks of Theon, freezing his pathetic skin off in the snow. He hates him, too, and it warms in him like hot wine. "I've grown up, Your Grace." He thinks he'd only decided as much just a moment ago. "There are more important things. You know that as well as I."

Jon thinks of Jeyne Poole, the Arya who is not Arya, and thinks of the real Arya, who could still be alive. He thinks of Ygritte with the arrow in her, bright hair spilled out on the snowy ground. _Kissed by fire_. He thinks of Melisandre and her sitting there, breasts bare in the snow after she'd saved him. He thinks of how Stannis feels after he's come, heavy and warm and instantly acting as if it hadn't happened. He thinks of Sam, down in Oldtown, and how he's expecting letters from Jon at The Wall.

"Wait out the worst of the snows," Stannis says to him, after several long moments, and Jon's not sure, but he thinks he's been given leave to go. "And I can only spare one horse, and not much in the way of provisions." He pauses for a bit. "It's a death sentence, you know."

Jon barely hears the latter part. "Thank you, Your Grace."

\---

He's prepared to ride as soon as he can, but the snows keep falling and a fortnight later he's still waiting, passing the nights in Stannis's rooms and speaking softly when Satin and Pyp will listen and glaring at Theon when he remembers, and waiting. 

The snows keeps falling, and Melisandre makes prophecies and the fires burn and if Jon had died out there, he doesn't feel it now. He watches the white sky and waits to leave home.


End file.
